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Paper Travelcards- forgeries

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fandroid

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I regularly buy a zones 1-6 one-day Travelcard online. (I have my reasons!). Last week I had an interesting conversation with a LOROL revenue protection person while travelling on the Overground. I had used GWR' s website to buy the ticket and had retrieved it from a SWT machine at Basingstoke. So, all very above board, or so I thought. This LOROL person told me that they are trained to look out for forged Travelcards, and that mine lacked two security features that should have been there. It was all very polite, and there was no question of me being charged a penalty fare or prosecuted, or even just being asked to pay again.

He even showed me what the security features should have been. I won't describe them here, as I don't want to encourage any lawbreaking!

Can anyone shed any light on this?
 
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Haywain

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Forgery of paper Travelcards (along with obtaining them by means of dud cheques and stolen credit/debit cards) has long been a problem and one would expect any revenue protection staff in London to know what they are looking for. It is a bit concerning though if a ticket vending machine is failing to print them out in the correct format, but that isn't something I have heard of happening.
 

TEW

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They are printed slightly differently by ticket machines printing new style tickets, such as those at Basingstoke, I wonder if that is what confused the RPI.
 

crehld

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It is a bit concerning though if a ticket vending machine is failing to print them out in the correct format, but that isn't something I have heard of happening.

Happens quite regularly. I've had a number of travelcards over the years that have printed out on two pieces of ticket stock in the style of separate outward and return tickets! (SWT and Southern machines seemed particularly prone to this when I lived down that way) Sometimes the words "Day Travelcard" fail to print at the top, and/or the little TfL roundel at the top doesn't print either. If "Day Travelcard" does print then the text size varies significantly. The words under "ticket type" seems to vary quite frequently also. Showing an odd looking travelcard to a member of ticket office staff after you've just picked it up usually illicits a "so what?" response, and I've never run into problems using odd looking travelcards with on board staff.

Unfortunately the railway industry seems unwilling to specify a common standard for the printing and format of tickets, or if it has such standards in place it seems unwilling to properly enforce them among TVM manufactures and ticket issuers - we're seeing exactly the same problem with the new ticket designs, where some TVMs will produce clear and legible tickets with no overlapping text, and others will not.

Anyway, I'm guessing paper travelcards aren't seen by staff that much anymore - at least that's the impression I got after a Thameslink RPI looked very confused after valiantly scanning my travelcard with an Oyster reader and getting nothing on the little display!
 

yorkie

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He even showed me what the security features should have been. I won't describe them here, as I don't want to encourage any lawbreaking!

Can anyone shed any light on this?
It sounds like the RPIs are mistaken, but without seeing how yours printed, and what features are claimed to be lacking, it's not easy to say.
 

Paul Kelly

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See attached for a photo of two Travelcards I purchased from Reading station in the past few months - the top one was issued from a booking office machine and the bottom one from a Scheidt & Bachmann TVM. Two obvious "potential forgery" issues I can see with the Scheidt & Bachmann one are the mysterious rectangular box at the top (looks like it's intended for a photocard number?) and the missing words "as advertised" from the text at the bottom - could these have been what the RPI was looking at?
 

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Mojo

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How amusing that the Tocs have been cottoning on to this; fake 7 day Travelcards have been being picked up by London Underground Inspectors for years now. They all work the gates too.

I saw an amusing briefing from Great Western a few months ago that picked up on a few "forgeries." Unfortunately the fact that there are so many different machines, printers and styles of printing makes it very difficult to detect fake tickets. Some of the things to look out for were pointed out in this briefing but rather amusingly many of the signs pointed out by the author appear on genuine tickets, as identified by the poster above me.
 

yorkie

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Examples of things that can be wrong include the wrong NLC code for the station printed on the ticket.

Large scale sale of such tickets on the black market may be detected by unusually large quantities of paper tickets starting to be used at implausible locations (e.g. loads of tickets purporting to be issued at Waterloo, but with an NLC code of Smethwick Galton Bridge appearing on the Stanmore branch... or something like that!)
 

[.n]

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How amusing that the Tocs have been cottoning on to this; fake 7 day Travelcards have been being picked up by London Underground Inspectors for years now. They all work the gates too.
.

Out of interest, if they work the gates then how do LU catch them?

Also if its possible to fake a 7 day ticket why wouldn't the forgers make monthlies or longer tickets instead?
 

yorkie

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[.n];2524473 said:
Out of interest, if they work the gates then how do LU catch them?
By manual checks!

You can check all paper tickets at a station quite easily, by setting the gates to reject all paper tickets, so no time is wasted checking those with Oyster/Contactless cards.

[.n];2524473 said:
Also if its possible to fake a 7 day ticket why wouldn't the forgers make monthlies or longer tickets instead?
I'm sure they do.
 

Peter Mugridge

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Unfortunately the fact that there are so many different machines, printers and styles of printing

Barry Doe in Rail 798 ( postal copy came this morning ) says that ATOC are acting on the variations in the new style tickets and have re-issued the specifications. He explains that the issue is similar to that of sending a Word document to various people with different software on their computers - they all see a slightly different version of what is the same document. Amongst other things, this new specification has abolished the smallest print font and should appear over the next few months.


I'll post this on the new tickets thread as well. :)
 
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Cletus

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See attached for a photo of two Travelcards I purchased from Reading station in the past few months - the top one was issued from a booking office machine and the bottom one from a Scheidt & Bachmann TVM. Two obvious "potential forgery" issues I can see with the Scheidt & Bachmann one are the mysterious rectangular box at the top (looks like it's intended for a photocard number?) and the missing words "as advertised" from the text at the bottom - could these have been what the RPI was looking at?

I had a Travelcard from a TVM outside the Southeastern platforms at St Pancras today. It was the same as the lower one in your post with the box and the same wording.
For some reason it didn't work the ticket barriers at some stations (Seven Kings & Bank for example).
 

sheff1

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I used a Travelcard from Sheffield today. It worked in the EMT barriers at St Pancras, and in all LU barriers, but failed in every Southeastern barrier I tried. None of the SE staff examined it at all - they just opened the barriers and let me through.
 
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maniacmartin

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I used a Travelcard from Sheffield today. It worked in the EMT barriers at St Pancras, and in all LU barriers, but failed in every Southeastern barrier I tried. None of the SE staff examined it at all - they just opened the barriers and let me through.

Was it a Super Off-Peak travelcard by chance? Last time I looked into this, Super Off-peak TCs didn't operate SET gatelines
 

Mojo

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If a Toc doesn't sell that type of Travelcard, I've always had trouble using them in their gatelines. For instance, I couldn't get a Super Off-peak Day Travelcard to work at Paddington, as GW don't do them, but it worked fine at St Pancras Int Low Level as Thameslink do.
 

maniacmartin

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By 'doesn't sell', you mean 'doesn't set the price of and thus forgot about' right.
 
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